An Open Framework for Integrating Widely Distributed Hypermedia Resources

The success of the WWW has served as an illustration of how hypermedia functionality can enhance access to large amounts of distributed information. However, the WWW and many other distributed hypermedia systems offer very simple forms of hypermedia functionality which are not easily applied to existing applications and data formats, and cannot easily incorporate alternative functions which would aid hypermedia navigation to and from existing documents that have not been developed with hypermedia access in mind. This paper describes the extension to a distributed environment of the open hypermedia functionality of the Microcosm system, which is designed to support the provision of hypermedia access to a wide range of source material and application, and to offer straightforward extension of the system to incorporate new forms of information access

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Conceptual Linking: Ontology-based Open Hypermedia

This paper describes the attempts of the COHSE project to define and deploy a Conceptual Open Hypermedia Service. Consisting of • an ontological reasoning service which is used to represent a sophisticated conceptual model of document terms and their relationships; • a Web-based open hypermedia link service that can offer a range of different link-providing facilities in a scalable and non-intrusive fashion; and integrated to form a conceptual hypermedia system to enable documents to be linked via metadata describing their contents and hence to improve the consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents)

Biodiversity informatics: the challenge of linking data and the role of shared identifiers

A major challenge facing biodiversity informatics is integrating data stored in widely distributed databases. Initial efforts have relied on taxonomic names as the shared identifier linking records in different databases. However, taxonomic names have limitations as identifiers, being neither stable nor globally unique, and the pace of molecular taxonomic and phylogenetic research means that a lot of information in public sequence databases is not linked to formal taxonomic names. This review explores the use of other identifiers, such as specimen codes and GenBank accession numbers, to link otherwise disconnected facts in different databases. The structure of these links can also be exploited using the PageRank algorithm to rank the results of searches on biodiversity databases. The key to rich integration is a commitment to deploy and reuse globally unique, shared identifiers (such as DOIs and LSIDs), and the implementation of services that link those identifiers

Astro-WISE: Chaining to the Universe

The recent explosion of recorded digital data and its processed derivatives threatens to overwhelm researchers when analysing their experimental data or when looking up data items in archives and file systems. While current hardware developments allow to acquire, process and store 100s of terabytes of data at the cost of a modern sports car, the software systems to handle these data are lagging behind. This general problem is recognized and addressed by various scientific communities, e.g., DATAGRID/EGEE federates compute and storage power over the high-energy physical community, while the astronomical community is building an Internet geared Virtual Observatory, connecting archival data. These large projects either focus on a specific distribution aspect or aim to connect many sub-communities and have a relatively long trajectory for setting standards and a common layer. Here, we report "first light" of a very different solution to the problem initiated by a smaller astronomical IT community. It provides the abstract "scientific information layer" which integrates distributed scientific analysis with distributed processing and federated archiving and publishing. By designing new abstractions and mixing in old ones, a Science Information System with fully scalable cornerstones has been achieved, transforming data systems into knowledge systems. This break-through is facilitated by the full end-to-end linking of all dependent data items, which allows full backward chaining from the observer/researcher to the experiment. Key is the notion that information is intrinsic in nature and thus is the data acquired by a scientific experiment. The new abstraction is that software systems guide the user to that intrinsic information by forcing full backward and forward chaining in the data modelling.Comment: To be published in ADASS XVI ASP Conference Series, 2006, R. Shaw, F. Hill and D. Bell, ed